Some 52 years ago, when I was in 4th grade of primary school, I found a book “who put glasses on the kid’s eyes” in a small book shop in open bazaar of my hometown Ahvaz in khuzestan province of Iran.

A few days later, we had to bring a book to school and read it in front of the class. Happy as I was to have found a great book, I took it to school and read it in front of the class.

I couldn’t understand why my teacher was acting so scared and stopped me before I had finished the book and sent me to the principals office.
I was nervous, didn’t know what I had done wrong and our principal, who was a really nice man, and went to the same university as my oldest sister took the book and asked me where I had bought it. I knew something was wrong, so I said I bought it at the book store of our local mosque, to protect the guy who was my source of cheap and lovely books and would buy back my old ones to help me afford buying new ones.

In the evening my father came home, agitated and clearly upset. Asked me what I have done and I explained the situation, including the fact that I lied about wher I had bought the book. Told him the highlight of the book about a happy child who was living in a town with happy people who were all wearing glasses.

He was seeing flowers, colorful houses. Nice people and happy children all around him, birds flying in the sky and everyone were so friendly to him.

Until one day he fell of and his glasses broke. He couldn’t believe his eyes, the flowers, colorful houses and happy people were all gone. All he could see was a run down city, with piles of garbage everywhere, people wearing worn out clothes, looking hungry and sick.

He was nece happy after that, he couldn’t believe that everyone were walking around with glasses and we’re happy all the time. But he was sad and miserable, because he had seen his town without those glasses.

Anyway. My father took me to a building close to the main police station on the other side of the Karun river, he spent almost entire day in a room where I could people screaming at him and a few times someone his the table very hard. But couldn’t hear what they were saying.
My dad came out. Pulled my hand without saying a word, we walked for an hour to get home, didn’t take taxi as we used to do.

He didn’t say a word during the whole day and told me to go over my books and bring all the books I had bought from that shop, he through them in a metal bucket and poured some fuel over it, set them on fire and waited until they were completely burned, mixed the ashes to turn them into dust, filled the bucket with water and through it in the toilet.

He told me to never go back to that shop and be careful to take any books to school from now on.

That’ was my first interaction with the notorious Savak police of Shah of Iran. In the next days, all the 4 book stores in our town were raided. Books confiscated and doors locked. Never heard about any of them again.

Reading the comments of pro Israeli accounts on mastodon reminded me of that book and that experience that changed my life when I was only 8 years old.

This post specially triggered those memories. Unlike the kid in my book and the people living in the town, these people know very well tat what they are posting is not true, they have seen the horror of the past 76 years of occupation, they have seen the 66 times they were subject to UNSC charges, and 45 that were vetoed by the US…

But they don’t care, they see themselves as victims. They don’t see the millions of starving palestinians, or the millions living in refuge camps around the world as worthy of their empathy or cause of why Palestinians and some of the world is fed up with their out of control criminal behavior

They don’t have glasses on their eyes, they have chosen to be selective and above the laws of the world.

#Israel #Iran #UNSC #Hypocrisy #Revisionism #Rant #Memories #Politics #Inhumanity

@palestine @israel